Science as an Aspect of God

Robert M Wallace is one of the leading Hegel scholars of today, he has a superb paper, found  HERE ,where he shows how Hegel’s conception of infinity enables him to integrate science and religion, and the “natural” and the “supernatural,” he also gave a talk on the subject which can be found HERE 

Below is a simplified power point outline he made of his essay :

I want to outline what I found after wandering for a long time in the wilderness of “modern” thought. 

I found it in Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, the sacred writings of many religious traditions, and in great literary artists, including Jelaluddin Rumi, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Virginia Woolf.

As a doctrine, it’s spelled out in an especially clear way in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). 

Hegel reconciles science and religion, and objectivity and subjectivity as well, by showing how science and objectivity (the pursuit of objective truth) are aspects of God, who is the ultimate “subject.” 

Besides science and objectivity, other aspects of God (or the ultimate “subject”) include religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy. 

Being aspects of the same ultimate reality, each of these (science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy) must be practiced in a way that respects all of the others. 

What would an “ultimate reality” be?

You might think that “reality” is simply what’s “objective,” and that science is the authority on that. In that case, no reality would be any more “ultimate” or less “ultimate” than any other.

But Hegel proposes a different conception of “reality”: What’s most real, he suggests, is what it is by virtue of itself, and not by virtue of its relations or interactions with other things. It’s the causa sui, cause of itself, as Spinoza put it. 

How could something be what it is “by virtue of itself”?

This idea is not as strange as it looks at first glance.

Example: When I merely react, unthinkingly, to my surroundings, I am like an extension of those surroundings. I’m not functioning as “myself,” in any significant way. Whereas if I think what to do or to believe, I am functioning as “myself,” and thus I’m more real as myself. 

If I lost a particular opinion or desire, I would still be entirely me. But if I lost my thinking, I would be no better than an automaton, and no longer real “as myself.”

So by acting “thoughtfully” or (on the other hand) “thoughtlessly,” I can be more or less real “as myself,” at different times.

A “more intensive” reality

This is why Socrates promoted the “examined life.” It makes us real as ourselves. Through it, Hegel says, we have a “more intensive” reality. “More intensive” because it makes us more “ourselves.”

Because science seeks knowledge, rather than just to confirm our preexisting opinions, science contributes to this “more intensive” reality in us.

This is how science is an aspect of a “more intensive” (what I earlier called the “ultimate”) reality.

Ethics

But religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy are also aspects of this “more intensive” reality. 

Ethics is an aspect of the more intensive reality insofar as ethics asks us to act in ways that may not correspond to the way we initially want to act. It asks us to act more “thoughtfully.” 

And insofar as ethics reflects our capacity for thinking (and not just our initial urges), it makes us more “ourselves” than we would otherwise be.

The Arts

The arts are aspects of the ultimate reality insofar as they have an inner logic that doesn’t reflect merely our existing desires, or conventional rules. 

This is why we find outstanding works of art “inspiring”: They suggest something that’s “higher,” more intensive, and more “itself” in a way that we ourselves would like to be higher, more intensive—and more fully ourselves. 

Religion, too, is an aspect

Religion, too, is an aspect of this more intensive reality, inasmuch as it asks us to act justly, to “love our neighbor,” and so forth. It holds out a higher ideal, in contrast to our initial desires, our self-importance, and the like.

But doesn’t religion subject us to an alien power (“God”), and thus make us less “ourselves,” and less real “as” ourselves?

Not if “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21),

and not if “in [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and so forth.

That is, not in a “mystical” version of religion, such as Hegel promotes (following Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and others, and resembling Adi Shankara’s “nondualism,” and doctrines of an omnipresent “Buddha nature”). 

In these views, God is not a separate being from us, though God is still “higher.”

Only the mystical God is truly higher

It can in fact be argued, and Hegel does argue, that the mystical view presents the only coherent conception of the higher reality. 

According to the conventional, non-“mystical” conception, God or the higher reality is a separate being from the world and from us.

But Hegel points out that a separate being is limited by what it’s separate from. So it’s not infinite. In fact, it’s just one of the beings that make up the world (though certainly an unusually powerful one).

So a God that’s truly infinite must be “within us” as well as beyond us. This is the only way it can truly be unlimited or infinite, and thus truly “higher” than us and higher than the world.

From “within,” it goes “beyond”

The mystical God is not limited by us, because it goes beyond us. But it’s not limited by being beyond us, either, because it’s also within us. From“within,” it goes “beyond.”

This is the beauty and the truth of mysticism. 

The mystical view is still “religion,” because (in it) what comes from within us truly goes beyond us. 

In that way, the mystical view presents an attractive version of religious notions like creation, faith, and salvation or enlightenment.

Creation and faith

The mystical view embodies a kind of “creation,” inasmuch as, by being present in the world, the God that Hegel describes gives the world all the (full) reality that it possesses. 

The mystical view embodies “faith,” inasmuch as the “higher” values and activities that it involves go beyond what our initial desires and opinions would dictate. The higher values and activities require a kind of commitmentthat ordinary materialism, hedonism, or egoism would not require, and they promise a kind of fulfilment, salvation, or enlightenment that materialism, hedonism, and egoism likewise can’t promise (or even conceive of). 

Salvation/enlightenment

By showing how we can be fully ourselves and at one with the fullest reality, Hegel’s view holds out a kind of salvation or enlightenment.

In Hegel’s view we become fully ourselves and at one with the fullest reality by committing ourselves to higher values and activities and giving up the self-centeredness or egoism that materialism takes for granted. 

Summing up

So this is how the sciences, the arts, ethics, and religion all contribute to a higher, more “ultimate” reality in which we are more fully ourselves, and we’re one with the full reality in everything. (This ultimate or full reality is what Hegel calls “absolute Spirit.”)

As for philosophy, it contributes to this ultimate reality by clarifying how the sciences, the arts, ethics, and religion all contribute to the ultimate reality, and thus making it clear how they can’t, ultimately, conflict with one another. 

So what about “subjectivity” and “objectivity”?

The sciences specialize in “objectivity.”

But that doesn’t mean that the philosophy of the higher, more intensive, or ultimate reality, which is not one of the familiar sciences, is therefore “subjective.” 

Rather, this philosophy identifies a kind of “reality” that the sciences, in their modern forms, do not study. Namely, the higher reality that is partly composed of the pursuit of scientific knowledge—together with ethics, the arts, religion, and philosophy. 

Beyond the “subject/object” contrast

By focusing on the “subject,” which is the scientist (and the ethical person, the artist, the religious worshipper, and so forth), all of which constitute the higher reality, the philosophy of the higher reality goes beyond the familiar contrast between “subject” and “object.” 

For by being “more intensive,” this “subject” is more fully real than any “object,” as such.

This is why Hegel says that “substance” always gives way to “subject.” The ultimate reality is this “subject,” which is most fully real. (Here you might think of “I am that I am” [Exodus 3:14].)

What does this doctrine tell us about the origins of life and mind?

It tells us that although life and mind weren’t “present” at the time of the Big Bang (if there was such a “time”), in the way that they’re now “present,” 

nevertheless, they constitute something that’s more fully “real” than what was “present” at that time. They are more real because they are indispensable aspects of science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy, and thus they are indispensable to the highest reality. 

And thus the history of the universe is the history not of transformations of a preexisting full “reality,” but of the emergence of a reality that’s fully “real” only after billions of years. 

This is the crucial sense in which the “potential” for life and mind was always there. 

Reality is inherently goal-directed

In fact when we understand what this process is, namely, the “emergence of life and mind,” we have to say that the “potential” for life and mind guided the entire process. 

This is because full “reality,” or “reality” in the fullest sense, is the process of the emergence of life and mind. To understand it properly, is to understand it as that. 

So this is the sense in which reality, throughout most of its history, is inherently “anticipatory,” teleological, goal-directed.

And we know this higher and goal-directed reality

Knowing that we inhabit a higher and goal-directed reality obviously makes our experience very different from the experience that we have when we suppose that we are part of a merely “flat” reality that contains nothing “higher,” and that has no inherent goal. 

And Hegel does suggest, I believe correctly, that we know that we inhabit a higher and goal-directed reality. 

We know this because Hegel’s doctrine (like Plato’s and Aristotle’s, before him) simply draws out the implications of our familiar and hardly controversial experience of sometimes being more real “as ourselves,” and sometimes less so. 

And this higher reality is “God”

To know that we inhabit a higher and goal-directed reality is to know that we inhabit something that, as higher and as the supreme goal, fits traditional descriptions of “God.” 

Since science is one of the ways in which we inhabit this higher reality, science is an aspect of “God.”

And since this God is also ethics (that is, love), art (that is, beauty), pure “subject,” and, as our supreme goal, our supreme fulfilment, it has everything that seems to be essential in traditional conceptions of God.

Modernity and the destruction of the imagination

CENSORING PHANTASY: ABOLITION OF THE PHANTASMIC

Excerpts from Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan P. Couliano


Chapter Nine

It is probably due to the influence of liberal Protestants that some history books still maintain that the Reformation was a movement of emancipation, whose aim was to free people from the repressive tutelage of the Catholic Church. Considering the multiplicity of Protestant sects, this idea might not be totally wrong, but it surely does not correspond to the original purposes of the Reformation, or to the ideologies of the main reformed denominations, Lutheranism and Calvinism. In leafing through history textbooks, we often come across this explanation of the Reformation: at the beginning of the sixteenth century there was a rich Church, organized into a powerful State and acting as such; the clergy and monks, for the most part, were also occupied with worldly things; trade in religious articles prospered; Luther came to end this situation through liberal reform: he granted the clergy the right to marry, he rescinded dealings in indulgences and the cult of images, he reduced to a minimum the external forms of ritual in order to concentrate on inward religious experience.

This is an explanation that takes results for causes and is satisfied with a moralistic point of view which, though useful in principle, is nevertheless dangerous in application. On the contrary, a breath of liberal air had been circulating in the Renaissance Church, which, through the cleavage between the modern mentality of the clergy and Christian morality, had led to many abuses. It was at this point that Luther arrived on the scene to reestablish the purity of the Christian message. Far from appearing as a liberal movement, the Reformation represented, on the contrary, a radical-conservative movement within the bosom of the Church, where it had several precursors (of whom it will suffice to mention here the preacher Savonarola in Florence). The Reformation did not claim to “emancipate” the individual; on the other hand it aimed to reestablish in the world a Christian order it believed the Catholic Church-which in its view had become a temporal institution-was unable to maintain. This is why the reformers consider the Church to be a supererogation which does not answer to the spirit of Christianity, and, by returning to the Bible, they intend not only to refute Catholicism but also to reestablish the original purity of the Christian community.

The revival of interest in eschatology, iconoclasm, rejection of traditional ecclesiastical practices, general participation in the creed, acceptance of marriage of the clergy as a malum necessarium permitted by St. Paul, are only a few aspects of the Reformation. Its most important result which, under the influence of Melanchthon, will in the final analysis be less apparent in the Lutheran Church than in that of John Calvin in Geneva and among the English Puritans, is the total rejection of the “pagan” culture of the Renaissance, of which the sale substitute is the study of the Bible. To attain this goal, the Protestant denominations do not hesitate to launch an intolerance which at first exceeded the intolerance of the Catholic Church, made more indulgent by the experience of the Renaissance. Characteristic of the Reformation is the fact that, recognizing no cultural reference other than the Bible, it repeated a situation in the history of primitive Christianity that corresponded to a phase of its birth: a Jewish sect engaging, rather hesitantly, in a dialogue with the Gentiles. Far from abrogating the Torah, the sect accepts the Old Testament as a whole, except to state that the life of the Christian is located not under the sign of the Law but under the sign of Grace. Now the Jewish religion is distinctive because, drawing its originality from the reaction against the Canaanitic cults, it has no graven images and it attempts to give a historical meaning to that which was represented by the neighboring peoples as periodical fertility cults. Hence, one of the most important goals of the Reformation is to root out the cult of idols from the Church. The results of this iconoclasm are tremendous if we consider the controversies about the Art of Memory aroused by Bruno in England: ultimately, the Reformation leads to a total censorship of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived by the inner sense.

Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by inner sense and had developed to the utmost the human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. It had created a whole dialectic of Eros in which phantasms, which at first foisted themselves upon inner sense, ended by being manipulated at will. It had a firm belief in the power of phantasms, which were transmitted by the phantasmic apparatus of the transmittor to that of the receiver. It also believed that inner sense was preeminently the locale for manifestations of transnatural forces-demons and the gods. By asserting the idolatrous and impious nature of phantasms, the Reformation abolished at one stroke the culture of the Renaissance. And, since all the Renaissance “sciences” were structures built on phantasms, they too had to be overpowered by the weight of the Reformation. But, we ask, what was the reaction of the Catholic Church? …the Church embarked on its own reform (which historians usually call the Counterreformation). Far from consolidating the positions assumed by Catholicism during the Renaissance, this movement severed itself completely from them and went in the same directions as protestantism. · It was along the lines of severity and harshness that the Reformation developed, from the Protestant as well as the Catholic side. The Counterreformation, however, has its own important characteristics. At the Council of Trent, which took place in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Church made clear its new style of behavior. It decided to assign the instrument of the Inquisition, which had been created in the twelfth century at the time of the anti-Cathar campaigns and had traditionally been in the hands of the Dominicans to anew, rigorous order dating from the sixteenth century: the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola. Henceforth, the name of the Holy Inquisition is intertwined with that of the Jesuits.

In the spiritual practices of the Jesuits, the phantasmic culture of the Renaissance is revealed in all its power for the last time. Indeed, education of the imagination represents the teaching method of Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, printed in 1596. The disciple is called upon to practice a sort of Art of Memory. During these exercises he must imagine the atrocious tortures of Hell, the sufferings of humanity before the incarnation of Christ, the birth and childhood of the Lord, his preaching at Jerusalem-while Satan, from his dwelling place in Babylon, launches attacks by his demons throughout the world-and, finally, Calvary, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It is a question not of pure meditation but of an internal phantasmic theater in which the practitioner must imagine himself in a role of spectator. He is not only to record what happens but to observe the actors through the senses of sight, hearing, and touch (Secunda Hebdomada, dies I-VII). Introjected in his own phantasmic apparatus, the phantasm of the practitioner is to participate-in a more or less active way-in the development of the scenario.

Loyola’s exercises obviously derive from the great achievements of the Renaissance in the manipulation of phantasms. But here these phantasms are placed at the service of faith, to accomplish the reform of the Church, which amounts to saying that they are actively in opposition to the legacy of the Renaissance. In Loyola, we find that the culture of the phantasmic directs its weapons against itself. At the end of several decades, this process of self-destruction will be almost complete.

(ii) Some Historic Paradoxes

…. The Reformation interests me only to the extent that it produced censorship of the phantasmic and, consequently, a profound change in human imagination.

…In the seventeenth century we observe two curious phenomena: the Reformation comes to fruition, and people begin to think, to speak, to act, and to dress in an entirely new way, but this occurs in the Protestant faction as well as in the Catholic, so that, despite the external differences between the Churches, the difference between the spirit of the Protestant Reformation and the spirit of the Catholic one are reduced to empty questions, such as the dispensing of communion, the confession of sins, and marriage of the clergy. A process of normalization occurs now, finding expression in the appearance of a new culture with more or less unitary traits from London to Seville and from Amsterdam to Wittenberg, Paris, and Geneva. …Without abandoning its millenary traditions, the Catholic Church moves towards Protestantism; for its part, Protestantism, without giving up the reforms for which it had done victorious battle on the local front, becomes consolidated in big institutions which more and more resemble the Catholic Church. The Catholic faith and the Protestant denominations have drawn as close together as possible without being aware of it.

Henceforth it is no longer a question of Reformation and Counter-reformation. Ever unwilling to recognize it, the principal Western faiths no longer fight alone. Side by side, they build a common edifice: modern Western culture. Individuals can still harbor deep suspicions regarding those who, they think, are on the other side of the barricades. In their total adhesion to their party, to their institution, they do not even perceive that those they consider adversaries resemble them and that the conflict at issue is no longer the essence of Christianity but merely a few matters of internal organization. The pagan culture of the Renaissance has been vanquished. To that result Catholics and Protestants contributed equally, unaware that, far from fighting among themselves, they had done battle against a common enemy.

All of this seems quite simple without necessarily being so. The Reformation, at its inception, draws into its orbit-even though it disavows them almost immediately-an extremely varied series of movements of the “left,” on a scale that goes from liberalism to libertinism, from utopianism to the spirit of revolution, from antiauthoritarianism to egalitarianism. These movements had appeared as a direct result of the Renaissance and, in their most useful manifestations, worked in conformity with the spirit and “sciences” of the Renaissance. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a liberal and utopian Catholicism still exists, represented by Brother Tommaso Campanella, who, after more than twenty years of persecution, nevertheless finds a pope in need of his knowledge of spiritual magic. In his reclusion, Campanella is visited by one of Johann Valentin Andreae’s group of friends. The influence of the Calabrian monk on the liberal Protestant movement concealed behind the “farce” of the Rosicrucians cannot be ignored. The singularity of the great thinkers who gravitate around this movement a Robert Fludd, a Kepler, a Descartes, or a Bacon-is that they refuse to subject themselves entirely to the reformed religion and continue to seek their sources of inspiration in the culture of the Renaissance. We are at the beginnings of modern science, which represent a continuation of the Renaissance insofar as the great discoveries of the seventeenth century still derive from the postulate of analogies between microcosm and macrocosm and from a complex of Pythagorean ideas about the harmony of the world; we are also at the beginnings of a negation of the Renaissance, insofar as the spirit of the Reformation produces a substantial modification of the human imagination.

As for the liberal and utopian movements, persecuted by the official churches-in a Europe rigorously moralistic and divided between two powers which, though enemies in principle, have the same essential

spirit-they will finally gain an enormous underground influence in the form of secret societies. The progress of the spirit of liberal institutions represents another of history’s enigmas, outside the province of this book. In the beginning, Protestantism-be it Luther’s conservative movement in Germany or the Calvinist terror in Geneva or the Puritan terror in England-was certainly no more liberal than the Jesuits. Nevertheless, we see in England the appearance of democratic institutions, whereas the Jesuits, before their expulsion from Latin America, organized on that continent the first communist experiment in modern history and possibly the only one that ever worked. It is not impossible that these paradoxes can be explained as an extension-or a revenge-of the culture of the Renaissance?



(iii) The Controversy about Asinity

… Agrippa and Bruno were both impulsive men with an amazing incapacity to understand the people and situations surrounding them. But, whereas Agrippa seems to renounce (for the sake of form?) his past as an occultist and to enter the ranks of the reformers, Bruno aspires to defend his ideas even into martyrdom, convinced that people great in spirit do not flinch from physical pain. Agrippa is too naive to compromise but sufficiently realistic to retract his ideas; on the other hand, Bruno is too proud to retract, but, having yielded to impulse which let him down paths of no return, he still hopes to find a solution through compromise. Here again, he sins not through naivete but its opposite, excessive guile, which has the same result. We have cited some of Bruno’s attempts to convert his followers to the use of the Art of Memory. We recall that his Spaccio de La bestia trionfante was a rejection of the signs of the zodiac, replacing them with a veritable cohort of virtues and vices. By such means Bruno meant to give to the system of astrological memory a more abstract and Christian character. Bruno was not the first to have the concept of a “Christian sky.” ‘The Middle Ages wished to replace all the signs of the zodiac by others, borrowed from the Bible-which Hippolytus rejected, warning against astro-theosophists. A Carolingian poet (the priest Opicinus de Canistris, of Santa Maria Capella) proposed replacing the Ram by the Lamb (Christ), and, in 1627, Julius Schiller suggested, in his Coelum stellatum christianum, substituting the apostles for the signs of the zodiac. L’Astroscopium by Wilhelm Schickhardt, in 1665, sees the Ram as the animal of Isaac’s sacrifice, the Twins as Jacob and Esau, and connects the Fishes with the parable of the loaves and fishes. This was only one step removed from an entirely arbitrary interpretation. Opicinus de Canistris breached the gap by assimilation to Capricorn because his own sin was pride and sensuality.”

… It is appropriate to recall here that the Inquisition itself made ample use of the weapon of imagination, only it aimed it against the culture of the phantasmic age. The Christianization of the signs of the zodiac stems from a process of the same kind. However, no attempt of that sort had any chance of success with the English Puritans, who had yielded to the abstract mnemotechnics of Pierre de la Ramee. To the Puritans, who had cast icons out of their churches, an apostle or a beast of the zodiac merely represented idols conceived by the imagination. This is why Bruno speaks to the Puritans in language much better adapted to influencing them than the phantasies of Andreas Cellarius: he replaces the beasts of the zodiac with abstract entities. But, on that account, the concessions he makes to Ramism are so great that the principal characteristics of his own system of artificial memory eventually become blurred.

(v) A Single Reformation

If the Catholic Church did not abandon its cult of images and the celibacy of its priests, there are other fields in which the Reformation, both Protestant and Catholic, arrived at the same results. We have only to think of the persecution of witches or the fight against astrology and magic. …Protestants and Catholics do not agree on outward religious observances or on the question of the celibacy of the clergy. But in the seventeenth century they seem to be at one concerning the impious nature of the culture of the phantasmic era and the imaginary in general. Catholics and Lutherans, to be sure, are slightly more tolerant than Calvinists; but they believe just as firmly that the practice of any kind of divination is inspired by demons. Now the site of communication between demon and man is the mechanism of phantasy. That is why the number one enemy which all of Christianity must combat is human phantasy.

(vi) The Change in Ways of Envisaging the World

The censure of the imaginary and the wholesale rejection by strict Christian circles of the culture of the phantasmic age result in a radical change in the human imagination. Here again, the works of some historians of ideas betray an ineradicable prejudice: the belief that this change was caused by the advent of heliocentrism and the concept that the universe is infinite. There are writers to this day who assert seriously that Copernicus (or Bruno, which would be much more accurate) was at the bottom of a “revolution” that was not only scientific but psychological as well. According to them, the finite Thomist cosmos was able to quiet human anxieties, which exploded as soon as the belief in an infinite universe became generally accepted.

That would not be serious if it were only schoolboys that were taught fairy tales of this kind, though they too deserve something better. Unfortunately they circulate even in the most learned tracts and it would be in vain to hope for their immediate cessation. At issue are made-up ideas so convenient and superficial that no one bothers to refute them any more. They continue to circulate, from generation to generation, forming one of the most tenacious traditions of modern culture. Responsible for this is a certain linear concept of the progress of history, which everywhere seeks signs of “change” and “evolution.” Because he advanced a heliocentric image of our solar system, which is closer to scientific truth, Copernicus is identified with a key moment of change, of evolution, in short, of progress.

It is noteworthy that those who still maintain that heliocentrism and the infinity of the universe have had a disastrous effect on the psychic equilibrium of the individual and the masses also share those ideas, since they do not doubt that the “guilty” are men like Copernicus and Bruno. When we subject to more careful analysis the historic framework in which these important changes in perspective on the cosmos took place, we see that the cardinal of Cusa, Copernicus, and Bruno all have a hand in it. First, let us ask ourselves whether the Ptolemaic-Thomist system could have had an equilibratory psychological influence on the individual. Not at all, since it taught that we were located, as it were, in the garbage can of the universe, at its lowest point. In Aristotelian cosmology, the essential idea is not simply that the earth is located at the center of the universe but that it occupies the lowest point of the universe: that it is, so to speak, the negative pole of the whole cosmos and that in this attribute it is characterized not by a superfluity of being but almost by a want of being; it amounts to less than what there is above it.

It is against this concept that Nicholas of Cusa raises his voice in an effort to endow the earth with a dignity equal to that of every other star. In the Ptolemaic cosmos the individual is, in a way-not essentially, of course, but accidentally-refuse in the garbage can of the universe. The individual in the infinite cosmos of Nicholas of Cusa is a precious stone contributing to the beauty of the “piece of jewlry” (kosmos), to the harmony of the whole.

It is impossible to say why the latter hypothesis should have been more “disequilibratory” than the former. The same thing applies to heliocentrism, which the most inspired seventeenth- century theologians accepted willingly. …When we go back to the heart of the dispute over the two systems of the universe, we come across the same arguments that were still being repeated a quarter of a century ago, so that we are amazed that our contemporaries have so little imagination. The first argument that Smitho, a supporter of geocentrism, sets forth against Teofilo, a supporter of heliocentrism, in La Cena de Ie ceneri of Giordano Bruno is the following: “Holy Scripture … almost everywhere assumes the opposite” (Op. it., I, p. 91). Teofilo replies that the Bible is not a philosophic tract (that is to say, scientific) and that, in addressing the masses, it is only concerned with appearances. Smitho grants that he is right but also remarks that to address the masses with speech which contradicts appearances would be sheer folly (p. 92)….

….The idea of the infinitude of the universe is not the only one which, extolled in the Renaissance, strikes terror in succeeding eras. What a difference there is between the justification of human free will in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity and the agonizing sense of responsibility experienced by the Protestant Kierkegaard! The idea of liberty, which allowed man to belong to the higher beings, ends by becoming a crushing burden, for there are no longer any points of reference. As soon as God withdraws into his complete transcendence, every human attempt to examine his design runs into a ghastly silence. This “silence of God” is, in reality, silence of the world, silence of Nature. To read in the “book of Nature” had been the fundamental experience in the Renaissance. The Reformation was tireless in seeking ways to close that book. Why? Because the Reformation thought of Nature not as a factor for rapprochement but as the main thing responsible for the alienation of God from mankind. By dint of searching, the Reformation at last found the great culprit guilty of all the evils of individual and social existence: sinning Nature.

Diminished things

Bertrand Russell (a secularist thinker, entirely unmotivated by sympathy for religion):

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure. We only know the intrinsic character of events when they happen to us. Nothing whatever in theoretical physics enables us to say anything about the intrinsic character of events elsewhere. They may be just like the events that happen to us, or they may be totally different in strictly unimaginable ways. All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13)

In other words, science doesn't tell us what a thing is, its inner nature. Science leaves out the thing, the reality, and gives us merely the abstract descriptions of the thing. 

HERE is Peter Leithart on William Desmond :



Modern thought is often materialist. Whatever happens to spirit in such an outlook, at least we’ve got things left. Right?

Not so, argues William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) . The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, he says, is a “classic bifurcation of thinghood into two extremes of objectivism and subjectivism.” It ends up diminishing things “on two fronts. On the one hand, objectivity contracts the range of concreteness. On the other hand, subjectivity is placed outside of the thing in a mind that has essentially nothing to do with things in themselves . . . . Equivocity is influential here in the very negative sense that a difference gets erected into a dualism of opposites.”

Citing Descartes’s distinction of  res extensa and  res cogitans , he argues that “Thinghood has been de-selved, objectified, reified in a homogeneous neutralization of thereness; selfhood has been abstracted from things in their concretenes and hovers mathematically over the quantitative homogeneity of exeternality, ready to impose the categories of its mathesis on that homogeneity.” 

Thus, “really there are  no things in Descartes. In different but related senses, there are also no things in Newton and Hume. The thing is decomposed under the gaze of the objectifying, univocalizing mind.” As an alternative, Desmon suggests that we have to learn to think “beyond univocity,” and recognize the “aesthetic presencing” of things that “present themselves” and are recognized as such “when the mind as other is in proper community with them, in proper rapport with things.” 

Again: “If things pluralize themselves, they are plurivocal in themselves. They utter themselves; they outer themselves; they bespeak themselves in more ways than one. I suggest that our plural perspectives on them is in response to this plurivocity of the thing itself. The diferentiation of the thing is just this, its qualitative plurivocalization . . . . A thing may be small or big, or may be big and small, depending on perspective, but this seeming contradiction is not something that comes from the outside of the thing itself. The thing presents itself plurivocally.” Seeing “as” doesn’t cancel “seeing is”: “When we see a thing as other, we may really be seeing it as it is.” 

Perspectivism isn’t relativistic in this case, but a hint of the multiple richness and plural presencing of things. In fact, perspectivism seems relativistic only when things are already diminished, only if things are univocally objects and their plurality a function of subjectivity. Nietzchean perspectivism is relativistic only when one retains the modern prejudice about things, which, as Desmond has argued, actually loses things.

Practice, not belief, is primary - Our doings precede our thinkings.

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."

- Francis Martin

James KA Smith uses George Lindbeck to defend that Christianity is more like a culture than an intellectual system, the following are some excerpts from his book Who's Afraid of Relativism : 

Christianity is a “form of life” found first and foremost in the community of practice that is the church. In other words, Christian faith (and religion more generally) is a kind of know-how; theology and doctrine, then, “make explicit” our know-how as know-that claims, articulating the norms implicit in the practices of the community that is the body of Christ.

Doctrines are, in a sense, derivative from practice. 

Religion (e.g., Christianity) is not a set of propositions that one believes but rather a (communal) way of life. Religion will be a matter more of initiation than of information, a matter of know-how before it ever becomes a matter of know-that.

In the cultural-linguistic model, “religions are seen as comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world”  Contrary to the cognitive-propositional model, religion is“not primarily an array of beliefs” but more like a “set' of skills” . 

But contrary to the individualism and subjective-approach, the culturaI-linguistic model emphasizes the essentially communal character of religion: 

“Like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities” . 

Discipleship, then, is a kind of acculturation: 

"To become religious involves becoming skilled in the language, the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one's world in its terms" . In short, a religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices precede and shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways. It takes a village to have an "experience." 

In a way, one needs to "try on" a whole new "picture"—be inculcated into a new (theoretical) practice—in order to he able to see the whole anew. And the only "proof" or demonstration that is possible, then, is the power of the new picture to help one make sense of the whole, and to feel its superiority to one's prior account.

Lindbeck's is a "cultural" model of religion because it emphasizes these dynamics of formation, socialization, and acculturation—all of which happen on the (implicit) level of know-how. The model is "linguistic" because this is how we learn a first language: it is caught, not taught. "To become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. 

One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly "articulated."A religion works like a language in this respect: "It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which this vocabulary can he meaningfully deployed" . 

Note that final emphasis: this is a language to be used, put to work in a way of life. 

Our doings precede our thinkings. Practice is primary. 

A comprehensive scheme or story used to structure all dimensions of existence is not primarily a set of propositions to be believed, but is rather the medium in which one moves, a set of skills that one employs in living one’s life. Its vocabulary of symbols and its syntax may be used for many purposes, only one of which is the formulation of statements about reality. Thus while a religion’s truth claims are often of the utmost importance to it (as in the case of Christianity), it is, nevertheless, the conceptual vocabulary and the syntax or inner logic which determine the kinds of truth claims the religion can make. The cognitive aspect, while often important, is not primary. - Lindbeck

So the real question is - What does doctrine do ?

In the cognitive-propositional, doctrines are primarily used to make truth claims; in the experiential- expressive, doctrines are used to express interior feelings and experiences. “The function of church doctrines that becomes most prominent” in the cultural-linguistic model “is their use, not as expressive symbols or as truth claims, but as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action.” 

If doctrines function as “rules” for the community of (religious) practice, this is only because those doctrines make explicit the norms that were already embedded in the community’s practiceIn other words, doctrines make explicit the know-how that was already implicit in our practice. To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

Narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic." Which of these is a good move, a good inference, is inextricably bound to the matter of the community of practice who are heirs of the apostles' teaching, who receive and read and inhabit the world of Scripture, and who pray to Jesus. That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense. In doing so, the community of practice is able to discern what counts as faithful practice. 

Doctrines are, in very real way, derivative from practice. 

Doctrines are not about the world or God, but how we can speak about those things on the first order level of prayer and proclamation...

Inferential, not referential claims…regulate truth claims…they make explicit the norms already in Christian practice…and then we can harmonize our commitments, renew or redirect our practices.

Doctrine is not synonymous with religion, nor is it either the center or foundation of religion. Religion is located primarily in our doings, in the practices that constitute a community of worship and devotion to God.

Part of the scandal of the cross is that the cross cannot be understood for what it is apart from one’s being enfolded into the community of practice that confesses “Jesus is Lord.”Our knowledge of this reality is relative to, and dependent upon, the Spirited community of practice that is the church.We are dependent upon such a communal context as the condition for understanding this as “the true story of the whole world. 

After all, Pagan converts to the catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life.

Only Love perceives Love

In Love Alone Is Credible, von Balthasar delves deeper into this exploration of what love means, what makes the divine love of God, and how we must become lovers of God in the footsteps of saints like Francis de Sales, John of the Cross and Therese of Lisieux.

This excerpt from Love Alone Is Credible is chapter 5, "Love Must Be Perceived."



If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other. The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love. In order for a selfish beloved to understand the selfless love of a lover (not only as something he can use, which happens to serve better than other things, but rather as what it truly is), he must already have some glimmer of love, some initial sense of what it is.


Similarly, a person who contemplates a great work of art has to have a gift–whether inborn or acquired through training–to be able to perceive and assess its beauty, to distinguish it from mediocre art or kitsch. This preparation of the subject, which raises him up to the revealed object and tunes him to it, is for the individual person the disposition we could call the threefold unity of faith, hope, and love, a disposition that must already be present at least in an inchoative way in the very first genuine encounter. And it can be thus present because the love of God, which is of course grace, necessarily includes in itself its own conditions of recognizability and therefore brings this possibility with it and communicates it.

After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child's smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty-sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core of the Thou. Knowledge (with its whole complex of intuition and concept) comes into play, because the play of love has already begun beforehand, initiated by the mother, the transcendent. God interprets himself to man as love in the same way: he radiates love, which kindles the light of love in the heart of man, and it is precisely this light that allows man to perceive this, the absolute Love: "For it is the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness', who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:6).


In this face, the primal foundation of being smiles at us as a mother and as a father. insofar as we are his creatures, the seed of love lies dormant within us as the image of God (imago). But just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace–in the image of his Son.

Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man. There has to be an encounter, in which the unilateral movement of God's love toward man is understood as such and that means also appropriately received and answered. If man’s response were not suited to the love offered, then it would not in fact be revealed (for, this love cannot be revealed merely ontologically, but must be revealed at the same time in a spiritual and conscious way).

But if God could not take this response for granted from the outset, by including it within the unilateral movement of his grace toward man, then the relationship would be bilateral from the first, which would imply a reduction back into the anthropological schema. The Holy Scriptures, taken in isolation, cannot provide the word of response, because the letter kills when it is separated from the spirit, and the letter's inner spirit is God's word and not man's answer. Rather, it can be only the living response of love from a human spirit, as it is accomplished in man through God's loving grace: the response of the "Bride", who in grace calls out, "Come!" (Rev 22:17) and, "Let it be to me according to your word" (Lk 1:38), who "carries within the seed of God" and therefore "does not sin" (i jn 3:9), but "kept all of these things, pondering them in her heart" (Lk 2:19, 51), She, the pure one, is "placed, blameless and glorious" (Eph 5:26-27; 2 Cor 11:2) before him, by the blood of God's love, as the "handmaid" (Lk 1:38), as the "lowly servant" (Lk 1:48), and thus as the paradigm of the loving faith that accepts all things (Lk 1:45; 1I:28) and "looks to him in reverent modesty, submissive before him' (Eph 5:24, 33; Col 3:18).

Had the love that God poured out into the darkness of nonlove not itself generated this womb (Mary was pre-redeemed by the grace of the Cross; in other words, she is the first fruit of God's self-outpouring into the night of vanity), then this love would never have penetrated the night and it would never in fact have had the capacity to do so (as a serious reading of Luther's justus-et-peccator theology illuminates in this regard). To the contrary, an original and creaturely act of letting this be done (fiat) has to correspond to this divine event, a bridal fiat to the Bridegroom. But the bride must receive herself purely from the Bridegroom ([kecharitoméne] Lk 1:28); she must be "brought forward" and "prepared" by him and for him ([paristánai] 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:27)[1] and therefore at his exclusive disposal, offered up to him (as it is expressed in the word [paristánai]; cf. the "presentation" in the temple, Lk 2:22 and Rom 6:13f; 12:1; Col 1:22, 28).

This originally justified relationship of love (because it does justice to the reality) in itself threads together in a single knot all the conditions for man's perception of divine love: (1) the Church as the spot less Bride in her core, (2) Mary, the Mother-Bride, as the locus, at the heart of the Church, where the fiat of the response and reception is real, (3) the Bible, which as spirit (-witness) can be nothing other than the Word of God bound together in an indissoluble unity with the response of faith.


A "critical" study of this Word as a human, historical document will therefore necessarily run up against the reciprocal, nuptial relationship of word and faith in the witness of the Scripture. The "hermeneutical circle" justifies the formal correctness of the word even before the truth of the content is proven. But it can, and must, be shown that, in the relationship of this faith to this Word, the content of the Word consists in faith, understood as the handmaid's fiat to the mystery of the outpouring of divine love. But insofar as the Word of Scripture belongs to the Bride-Church, since she gives articulation to the Word that comes alive in her, then (4) the Bride and Mother, who is the archetype of faith, must proclaim this Word, in a living way, to the individual as the living Word of God; and the function of preaching (as a "holy and serving office"), like the Church herself and even the Word of Scripture, must be implanted by the revelation of God himself, as an answer to that revelation, as it is illuminated by the relationship between the Church and the Bible.

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love. But this occurs only in grace, that is, by virtue of God's original gift of a loving response that is adequate to God's loving Word. And therefore, the creature responds in connection with, and "under the protective mantle" of, the fiat that the Bride-Mother, Mary-Ecclesia, utters in an archetypal fashion, once and for all. [2]

It is not necessary to measure the full scope of the faith achieved in human simplicity and in veiled consciousness in the chamber at Nazareth and in the collegiurn of the apostles. For the unseen seed that was planted here needed the dimensions of the spirit or intellect to germinate: dimensions that, once again, stand out in a fundamental and archetypal way in the Word of Scripture, but which first unfold in the contemplation of the biblical tradition over the course of centuries–"written on the tables of our hearts" and henceforth "to be known and read by all men" (2 Cor 3:2-3), written "in persuasive demonstrations of spirit and power", spirit as power and power as spirit (i Cor 2:4). That which the "Spirit" of God, however, interprets in our hearts with "power" (and which the Church interprets in "service to the Spirit" [2 Cor 3:8]) is nothing other than God's own outpouring of love in Christ; indeed, the Spirit is the outpouring of the Son of God, "the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor 3:18), since the Lord himself "is Spirit" (2 Cor 3:17).

When Christ is immediately thereafter designated the "Image of God" (2 Cor 4:4), then this expression ought not to be reduced to mythical terms, since myth was definitively left behind with the dimension of the Incarnation of the Word, which surpassed it. He is the "Image", which is not a merely natural or symbolic expression, but a Word, a free self-communication, and precisely therefore a Word that is always already (in the grace of the Word) heard, understood, and taken in, otherwise, there would be no revelation. There is no such thing as a "dialogical image", except that which exists at the higher level of the Word, although it remains true–and contrary to what Protestant and existential theology may claim–that the Word preserves and elevates in itself all the value of the image at the higher level of freedom. if the Word made man is originally a dialogical Word (and not merely in a second moment), then it becomes clear that even the level of the unilateral (ethical-religious) teaching of knowledge has been surpassed.


It is not possible that Christ could have written books ("about" something, whether about himself, about God, or about his teaching); the book "about" him must concern the trans-action between him and the man whom he has encountered, addressed, and redeemed in love. This means that the level on which his Holy Spirit expresses himself (in the letter), must necessarily itself be "in the spirit" (of the love of revelation and the love of faith), in order to be "objective" at all. To put it another way, the site from which love can be observed and generated cannot itself lie outside of love (in the "pure logicity" of so-called science); it can lie only there, where the matter itself lies–namely, in the drama of love. No exegesis can dispense with this fundamental principle to the extent that it wishes to do justice to its subject matter.